They are vast, abstract blocks of colour from afar. Regimented, seemingly infinite rows, of orange, yellow, pink, and red. An astonishing sight. An immense whole composed of hundreds and thousands[1] of one small thing: a tulip, tulip, tulip. Repeated to infinity.
Such was Claire Milbrath’s experience when first arriving to Keukenhof gardens in Lisse, Netherlands in 2023. A pilgrimage to 79 acres of land where about seven million tulip bulbs are planted each year. In these deliberately organized colour blocks of flowers, Milbrath recognized devotion, obsession, and an extreme beauty that simultaneously felt boundless and like it was contained within an artwork, recalling Maurice Denis’s statement “that a painting […] is essentially a flat surface covered with colours, put together in a certain order.”[2] It was a feeling of rapture. It was a spectacle to behold, to move toward, approaching closer and closer, until the long strips of colour became a single flower. A flower that Milbrath had the urge to climb into and be enveloped by, to see it from within, later leading to works like Green Altar and Green Fuse (all works 2024) that visualize the interior of a tulip as a microcosm and altar to nature.
Throughout the exhibition Green Fuse, Milbrath pursues tulips and her experiences at Keukenhof and later to Skagit Valley, in Washington state, which is captured in the video work Tulips (2025). In the first tulip works she created, Milbrath rendered them by individually painting each flower, a process of almost manic mark-making that carries over into works in the exhibition like Keukenhof and Skagit Valley. This creates an intensive rhythm to the pieces that also mirrors the extensive labour involved in growing and maintaining these sites. The obsession and labour for tulips extends far back throughout human history, with significant peaks of adoration beginning in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th century—prolifically adorning imperial gardens and textiles as well as ceramics and masonry—and later during “Tulipmania” in the Dutch Republic in the 1630s, when a fixation on the flower resulted in a craze of disastrous speculation. A wild flower at heart, once tulips intersected with humans so began a love that came with controlled cultivation, excessively manipulating, regimenting, and valuing its growth while endowing it with great symbolic meaning, even becoming the official flower of the Protestant Reformation.
Several works in Green Fuse are created on panels, referencing the organized blocks of the tulip fields as well as the Nabis movement of 1888 to 1900. Led by Denis alongside Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, Nabis were dedicated to elevating decoration as the primary function of art therefore blurring the line between painting and craft, artwork and wallpaper, leading them to paint directly on ceilings, tapestries, and other furnishings. Pattern and ornament were praised and decorative projects were embraced, not eschewed. When Milbrath experienced Nabis works in person, she identified how their wildly patterned interiors buzzed with emotion and neurosis, closing a gap she was experiencing between her own decorative-leaning style (like Pink Interior) and her desire to express personal emotions. Not unlike Dutch Tulip Fever, Milbrath recognized the seductiveness of an obsession. And how the patterned sight of the flower’s simple, decorative beauty could quell and contain the tumultuous currents that have nurtured its blooms. Both in Nabis art and in tulip fields, repeated, minute elements can amount to a vast pattern of totality. Likewise, when decorative painting becomes a tool to order thoughts, painting becomes like a garden, an attempt to assemble and order nature’s chaos into visually appealing work.
By researching tulips and painting them again and again, Milbrath was attempting to sow emotional order in each flower, hoping to harvest spiritual communion in the ritual of painting. But obsessively rendering each blossom began to feel punitive. In time, she felt a desire to break the pattern and intimately depict just one tulip at a time, devotedly climbing into its centre from which she could elevate “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” [3] From there, how could she look upon them next? It was at this time that Milbrath received the suggestion that tulips at a distance could be painted with less detail, indicated only by a few gestural strokes. Embracing abstraction for the first time, Milbrath’s individual blooms would become united, a single block of homogenized colour. She began hesitantly, with a field of red tulips—the first row done in painstaking detail, the second in a little less, moving backward in the canvas, until a solid block of red emerged. Tulip Field I are the ultimate realization of this process, of moving back out to the infinite blocks of tulips, their pure colours, abstracted into long stripes,that Milbrath first saw when nearing Keukenhof. Hundreds and thousands, joyously becoming one.
-Text by Clara Puton
[1] “Hundreds and Thousands are minute candies made in England—round sweetnesses, all colours and so small that separately they are not worth eating. […] It was these tiny things that, collectively, taught me how to live. Too insignificant to have been considered individually, but like the Hundreds and Thousands lapped up and sticking to our moist tongues, the little scraps and nothingness of my life have made a definite pattern.” Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited; Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1966), v.
[2] “Exposition au musée Maurice Denis,” Musée D’Orsay, https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/presentation/maurice-denis.
[3] Dylan Thomas, « The force that through the green fuse drives the flower », 18 Poems (1934).
